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Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Rhoads: "Inequality" is a phony issue

By Mark Rhoads -

Lately pundits on the Left have been making a lot of noise about how they favor income equality and conservatives oppose it. Of all the dubious issues floating around American politics, this is one of the most bogus.

At no time in history has there ever been complete equality of income across the whole of a population except in the crazy fanasies of socialists. There is nothing immoral or wrong at all about some people working harder than others to make more money, nor is there anything wrong with some people having a greater share of material goods than othres if they are willing to earn it by their own honest efforts.

Try to imagine this thought experiment. Suppose that a socialist could wave a magic wand and everyone would wake up one morning with exactly the same amount of money. By sundown of that same day, some people would have more money than others because during the course of the day they would be willing to trade their time and skills in exchange for the labor, goods, or service of other people.

The moral position is not to steal from one person to bestow on another in order to re-distribute wealth as Huey Long and Barack Obama wanted to do. The moral position is to allow each person the freedom of opportunity to earn and keep the fruit of their own labor and skill in order to pass on a better standard of living for their children.

Socialists want government to legalize the plunder of your resources by people who do not want to work very hard and they camouflage their real intentions by dressing up the theft as a morallly justified leveling of personal wealth. But like so many socialist schemes, the forced redistribution of wealth only attacks your freedom and your autonomy and steals from your pocket in order to worship at the altar of a fake idea of "equality."

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Rhoads: "Inequality" is a phony issue

By Mark Rhoads -

Lately pundits on the Left have been making a lot of noise about how they favor income equality and conservatives oppose it. Of all the dubious issues floating around American politics, this is one of the most bogus.

At no time in history has there ever been complete equality of income across the whole of a population except in the crazy fanasies of socialists. There is nothing immoral or wrong at all about some people working harder than others to make more money, nor is there anything wrong with some people having a greater share of material goods than othres if they are willing to earn it by their own honest efforts.